Edward Luttwak

Peace is breaking out all over the world, and future wars will all be small and restricted, according to influential US advisor Edward Luttwak.

He's in Australia talking about war and peace at the Creative Innovation Conference which has just wound up in Melbourne.

However, Edward Luttwak is no peacenik. For him war has a purpose and a place, and a natural flow, which you interrupt at your peril.

War is about winners and losers, he says, and the modern distaste for such hard-headed thinking does no-one any favours. Mr Luttwak is used to being at the centre of things -- a senior associate at the centre for strategic and international studies in Washington, and he has served as an adviser to the US Department of State, the US military and NATO

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Mark Bannerman: Now Peace is breaking out all over the world, and future wars will all be small and restricted. That is, according to influential US adviser, Edward Luttwak. He's in Australia talking about war and peace at the Creative Innovation Conference which has just wound up in Melbourne.

However, Edward Luttwak is no peacenik. For him, war has a purpose and a place and natural flow which you interrupt at your peril, or at our peril. War is about winners and losers, he says, and the modern distaste for such hard-headed thinking does no-one any favours.

Edward Luttwak is used to being at the centre of things: a senior associate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, he has also served as an advisor to the US Department of State, the US military and NATO. He's a lucid and provocative thinker, and I welcomed him to Saturday Extra.

Edward Luttwak: Thank you.

Mark Bannerman: Now I have to say that reading many of the articles you've written, I find incredibly challenging, because perhaps much of it is counter-intuitive. But the conventional thinking if we can start is that in International Studies the advent of the bomb, that is the nuclear bomb, permanently changed our attitude to war, because there was the concept of mutually assured destruction. Is that the way you see it, or what does that really mean for us, do you think?

Edward Luttwak: Well when nuclear weapons were first invented, it was believed that they would be like other weapons and more effective, more powerful. Then very quickly of course, nuclear weapons became enormously more powerful, nothing like previous weapons and therefore very soon, once this was understood, seen in historical terms, it did take 20 years, people understood that nuclear weapons were too powerful to be used. And therefore the process, this infinitely long human process of improving weapons to be able to fight more effectively, had reached a culminating point, and instead of the most powerful recent weapon being the most effective, it becomes ineffectual.

Once this was understood, that was the end of the superpower crisis, and it was the advent of the nuclear peace, and to this day, there is no possibility of a war between the so-called great powers, or major powers, Chinese, Russian, French, British, Americans and so on, they're simply never going to fight.

Mark Bannerman: So what does that mean? You talk about the possibility of allowing small-scale conflicts to burn themselves out?

Edward Luttwak: Right, OK. So step number two is that once the big boys don't fight wars any more, then the next thing is that you have a middle category of bellicose, noisy, aggressively speaking entities like North Korea and Iran and so on. But of course they're incapable, their military power is made of cardboard. They talk big, they threaten. If they ever get involved with fighting, they fall back in their real quality, which is very poor. The last one of course was Saddam Hussein's Iraq back in 1990 when all these dozens of armoured divisions and hundreds of combat aircraft and this and that and the other, crumbled.

So why do we still have wars? And I believe we have wars for a reason that we have created a peace-making mechanism, that is very perverse and very wrong, because there is still conflict here and there for smaller entities, and war throughout history did bring peace. If you go to where war lived most comfortably, like Europe, it's not like it's a desert. You see all the cities they built, the cathedrals, the houses, the wealth, the technology, the science. How did they do it? Because they had peace. When did they have peace? When the previous war had reached its natural conclusion, had used up the resources, burnt out all these hopes and fears and ambitions and brought an organic, natural peace. And what's happened since 1945, we have an artificial mechanism: the moment they start fighting, slap a cease-fire, stop it, freeze it, and you never allow war to bring peace.

Mark Bannerman: All right, we'll get to that in a minute, but let me just drill down here. Are you saying that you just let wars be fought? For example, if Israel were to want to fight with Iran, do we just leave it go?

Edward Luttwak: Absolutely. If such a war were to begin, which I seriously doubt, because you know, they're very far from each other, so there wouldn't really be a war. A normal thing would be let's say Israel fights with Syria, you know, something like that. The moment you interfere with that, and you put on a cease-fire because you are moved by the casualties and the television pictures of suffering and so on, then you prevent that war from reaching peace, and you freeze it, like Bosnia. If you go to Bosnia today, where outsiders came in and stopped the war, artificially, there's no peace. Nobody's building anything, there's no confidence. It's simply war congealed. And that's what we have done through this mechanism, you know Kashmir, and the Arab/ Israeli -- all kinds of conflicts; we've invented a false peace-making mechanism.

Mark Bannerman: Well I think you call it a premature peace-making process, but can I just ask you this: again, this seems to go against the instinct for many. The instinct when there is a war is to try and intercede and stop it, because there is suffering, there's brutality.

Edward Luttwak: But then you don't bring peace. What you do is, you create a protracted conflict that never ends, that simply continues year after year, decade after decade, and people cannot get on with life, move on, and do other things. We've created a whole mechanism and it's very perverse, it's all motivated by goodwill, by good intentions, by love of humanity, like let's say they're refugees, well you have to give them refugee camps. Then what happens? Six years later they're still there, they're still wanting to go home, instead of having dispersed like -- imagine this had happened through history, you would go to Europe and you wouldn't find France, Italy, Germany, whatever, you would find vast camps for fleeing Visigoths and lost Huns and disappointed Romans, you know, all being fed by the UN. That's what's been going on parts of Africa, that's what happened in the Middle East, and this is something that we must stop.

Mark Bannerman: OK, so should the United States have intervened in the Second World War? In Europe, I'm talking about now, setting aside the Japanese, should they have intervened?

Edward Luttwak: Yes, well the issue is does a great power want to intervene? That's a matter of statecraft. I'm talking about not the behaviour of great powers over everybody else, or small powers, it is third parties, outsiders, motivated by scant knowledge. Maybe seeing television pictures of suffering. Imagine we had pictures coming back from D-Day, and you saw thousands of young men being killed on television. Maybe if there'd been an outside bigger power, you know, Mars, Venus, whatever, they would have intervened and stopped it, and to this day like in Korea, there would be a demilitarised zone somewhere in Normandy with Nazis on one side, and allies on the other in a protracted, frozen conflict. Like in a Kashmir cease-fire line, and so on and so forth. This is -- we have invented this perverse, United Nations mechanism where outsiders step in and prevent war from achieving its purpose, which is to end it.

Mark Bannerman: OK, well let's go to another conflict, more recent: Kosovo, where we saw people potentially going to be brutalised and slaughtered, and the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early '90s led a lot of people to believe that this sort of thing would happen again, where concentration camps might occur. Was it appropriate to step in there?

Edward Luttwak: Well, as it happens, as you well know from the way you put the question, in the end it turns out that there was no genocide in Kosovo. There was no such thing going on, and the reason why NATO went against Serbia, the Americans bombed Serbia quite heavily with Italian support, is because they had not intervened previously, when really there were the massacres. And this is the recurrent phenomenon. You see the counter-argument to my whole line of thinking is, Well oh, you're going to let people die. You're going to let hundreds of thousands die. And you know the paradox, the irony here is that whenever there is a huge massacre, like Rwanda, Rwanda, hundreds of thousands, Khmer Rouge before that, the actual Srebenitza which were not hundreds of thousands but definitely thousands a day and so on, strangely enough all these eager interveners never intervened. Never intervened. So the argument is, if we do that -- if we stay away there'll be genocides. Answer: whenever there is a genocide, strangely enough, nobody intervenes. When people do intervene is when there actually are rather few casualties, and simply it plays that way. That is how we have the miraculous fact that we intervene here and there and there; whenever lots of people get killed, we don't intervene.

Mark Bannerman: OK. So let's just take another even more recent conflict, one that goes on now: Afghanistan. The situation there -- and again you have a provocative point of view about this, that in fact you say that by attempting to introduce democracy, build schools, hospitals, all the rest, we are doing the very worst thing that we could do. So first up, America made a major mistake by going in there. That's your view?

Edward Luttwak: No. When the United States first went in, in 2001, very soon after the outrageous attack in New York, the purpose was to knock off the Taliban government that was protecting the Arab terrorist organisations al-Qa'eda and so on, and to go after them if possible. But certainly to knock off the Taliban because of what they had caused to be done. OK? So you go into a country, these are your enemies, you smash them. Then you go home. What's happening now in Afghanistan is something completely different, because the United States and its allies, including Australia, very much under Australian leadership by the way, because a lot of Australian ideas have gone into this thing, had this idea of transforming Afghanistan, changing Afghanistan, maybe into something like Denmark or Sweden or New Zealand. We're going to bring democracy, enlightenment, progress and so on. In other words, hijacking the whole history of Afghanistan, at huge cost, at enormous cost, $7 billion a month, in order to build the schools that the Taliban destroyed much more cheaply. And this is a megalomaniac project and it's got nothing to do with defending yourself, knocking down your enemy. And it makes no sense at all. Historically, in the past, through centuries, you invaded a country like that if you wanted to operate the gold mines there and take away something else, you impose taxation on them, turn them into a tax paying province. But to intervene in this disinterested fashion with all these NGOs, all these well-meaning NGOs running around trying to transform somebody else's way of life, this is a - as a taxpayer, I bitterly resented doing this, and of course it's bound to fail.

Mark Bannerman: So finally then, and we are getting short of time, but you seem to be suggesting then, in most respects, America should have some sense of isolation, return perhaps to isolationism, and in league with that, it would then need very good preventative diplomacy to further its end, and strategic diplomacy. How does that work for America, for example?

Edward Luttwak: Well preventative diplomacy everybody should need, because to avoid conflict, but certainly I don't advocate isolation, to the contrary. It is the vocation of Americans, and the particular talent of Americans to have built and maintained alliances. No alliance in history has ever lasted anywhere near as long as the North Atlantic Treaty alliance, let alone ANZUS alliance. In history alliances last a few years and then they all go away. So we must do all of that. And secondly, if anybody attacks us we have to do the right thing which is to go and smash them, and make everybody sorry that they ever thought of attacking us.

Mark Bannerman: All right, very finally, and very briefly: do you believe that we will have more or will we have fewer wars in the coming 50 years?

Edward Luttwak: Well first of all we have not new wars but the protraction of old wars due to this perverse intervention mechanism, and I wish that we laid off that, let them get on with it, and then we would have fewer past wars. As for other wars, I think that the scope of war has enormously narrowed. You see, once the great powers are out of business, once the war has been left to the losers and the backward, and countries that have to be near the backward and the losers and the neighbours and the victims of the wars, then you have a fairly narrow range of potential combatants. You see, the winners in the world, they want to get on with it, they want to grow, develop, technology, science, culture, whatever. And only the ones who are parked next to losers are forced into war. Also when they try to have wars, of course they're incapable; they don't have the organisational ability, their armies fall apart, and that is why the scope of war has become limited. In other words, once the great powers are out of anything, that thing ceases to be important.

Mark Bannerman: All right. Edward Luttwak, we'll have to leave it there, thank you very much for talking with us.

Edward Luttwak: Thank you.

Mark Bannerman: Now Edward Luttwak is a Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. And if you have any thoughts about that interview or any other segment on Saturday Extra, please drop us a line. You can go to our home page and from there send an email or make a comment.

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Comments (15)

Roger :

11 Sep 2010 8:29:20am

There is logic in what Mr. Luttwak has said as brutal as it may sound. Being a Vietnam Veteran our purpose as it is now known was never to win the war, the political solution had to come first, not the military solution. Cost a lot of military lives as well as civilian lives and took 30 years (1945 to 1975) to resolve

Bluecat :

I heard this man with increasing anger, and with bile rising in my throat.

Here is a rich selfish, out of touch man being "Clever".

Has he watched the haunted eyes of a child who has seen his family destroyed in front of him, by soldiers with faces distorted with hate? Let him say that war is good for business then.

Has he walked through a village destroyed by those same soldiers, the stench of death in the air, crops destroyed, and the land devastated and made useless and dangerous by landmines for generations to come. Let him say it is better for a war to run its course then.

Wart is undoubetedly good for business, Krupps found that out in WW2, and the only reason the US is not a third world country is that it is the supplier of military misery to the rest of the world.

Peace will also be good for us all, but not for the pathetic speciments of humanity that this monster represents. Deny him the mediaair he needs to survive . We don't need his hatefulness.

Damien :

15 Sep 2010 7:42:09pm

I can comprehend the arguments being put about the need to accept that conflict as such needs to be allowed to be expressed. Sadly those who see this being usefully and valuably expressed in war are the inheritors of a mind set that should have died with the tens of millions of the war to end all wars. One day those who espouse such depravities will, as Bluecat suggests, pay more attention to the voices of their hearts when faced with the haunted eyes of those who have witnessed the destruction, rather than to whatever benefits they may personally accrue.

James :

11 Sep 2010 8:41:40am

My thought might be based in semantics but I think it reveals something of the condition of war and peace.

I came to realise that the word “peace” when used in discussing international conflict was actually best defined as a lack of war, rather than the opposite of war. Living in peace is really only the temporary end to conflict or a ceasefire, yet at these times the hostility always remains.

I don’t know if we have a word that clearly defines the opposite of war but if war is destructive, than the opposite of war must be constructive. If our goal is to create a lasting peace, then our actions when faced with conflict must be focused on constructive outcomes. The accusations and hostility must be replaced with trust, communication, exchange, and even creating dependencies among one another. I think it’s interesting that western civilisation has lost, or never had, a word that describes this constructive opposite to the destruction of war.

G Hawthorne :

11 Sep 2010 9:23:38am

The first principle of war, as taught by the RAAF in the 1960's, was (roughly)- "A clear statement and maintenance of the aim and purpose of the war" (As in "the unconditional surrender of Japan" in WWII).

This principle is ignored today; we just make it up as we go. Then the bleeding hearts and do-gooders come out of the woodwork, demanding we make the country "just like our version of democracy", and we end up in these seemingly endless conflicts at great sacrifice of, and damage to, best and bravest young people. (And huge financial cost.) Then we eventually sneak out pretending we were successful; only repeat a similar folly sometime down the track.

trudy :

12 Sep 2010 9:10:11pm

Interesting, thought provoking! Though, there was a bit of loose logic in some of his line of arguments. For instance, he says because we have seen wars with terrible atrocities, where UN (or similar, called here "UN") did not intervene and we have seen wars with not so very terrible atrocities where "UN" did intervene, shows that it is pointless or in-effectuous for "UN" to intervene. I think it is just as readily possible to interpret this situation to the extent that it shows, that when "UN" is intervening, then a war may not escalate as much as when they don't intervene.

Emir :

15 Sep 2010 9:23:12pm

Tell that to the 8000 in srebrenica that where watched by Dutch peacekeepers (gutless losers) who watced it happen...So much for the UN intervening...fat lot of good that did (i.e. NOTHING)...8000 people died either way, the UN made NO DIFFERENCE...easy for you to say Trudy, you didn't have relatives who died in real massacres...

Ghali :

15 Sep 2010 8:11:27am

It is unbelievable that a public broadcaster like the ABC waste taxpayer’s money on fascist propagandis like Edward Luttwak.

Who is “a middle category of bellicose, noisy, aggressively speaking entities like North Korea and Iran and so on”? We all know that Iraq was a defenceless nation. And we all know that without the support of Iran and other corrupt regimes in the region, the Iraqi Resistance would have kicked the Americans out long time ago.

We all know that the US do not fight armies. It is a US requirement that the enemy has to be a defenceless enemy in order for the US to commit act of aggression.

Tim P :

15 Sep 2010 9:00:54am

I agree with Edward Luttwak's thesis regarding protracted wars due to the idea that any peace is better than war. I lived in Sierra Leone from 1989 to 1997. In 2007 the RUF with the army captured the capital whereby the country was in a stalemate for 12 months. Britain, USA and france held back the opposing forces and instead tried to broker peace agreements that lead to a stalemate and a false peace afterwards. During the false peace of 1997 starvation and stagnation was the order of the day. The citizens themselves said at the time that it would be better to let the fight continue until the RUF was defeated. In the short to medium term there would be casualies and sufferring but then it would be done. The stalemate lasted until 2001 when British troops intervened and prosecuted the war. In the end the RUF was defeated and the country was able to move on. The cost of the war was severe for all members of society such that today few citizens would see war as an option to resolve political disputes, hence everybody is fully vested in the peace they have today.

In 1996 the government was in a position to defeat the RUF with foreign mercenaries who were very professional and competant. It was the intervention of the western powers that held them back and kept trying to broker peace agreements. Hence the war dragged on for 5 years longer than it needed to at huge cost.

John - Adelaide :

15 Sep 2010 4:09:14pm

I've only just had the opportunity to hear this interview. What amazes me is the sheer naivity of the Luttwak proposition, given his long experince in the field. Have all wars met a natural stable conclusion in the past? WW1 only brought about WW2 despite the Germans being hammered into an unconditional surrender. Many would think it was the Marshall Plan after WW2 that brought about the extended peace eactly the type of operation Luttwak seems to object to. Wars in Luttwaks world are stripped of all political and social context. He asks what would have happened if we had seen TV pictures of the DD Landings? I don't know the answer to that but I do know that it is the new reality of modern warfare. Wherever there is conflict there will be TV pictures and internet and all manner of communications e.g. the photos taken by US soldiers at Abu Grab, mobile phone videos, internet video by Taliban of IED explosions. That is the context for modern warfare. He is also very unfair to David Kilcullen the Australian Counter Insurgency expert. I'm pretty sure Kilcullen's opinion was for the US not to invade Iraq in the first place but having invaded the war had to be fought on a counter insurgency basis.

Rolf Bueskens :

19 Sep 2010 6:22:39pm

Just a minor but significant correction: The ‘unconditional surrender’ was imposed on Germany during World War II. Towards the end of World War I, Germany proposed an armistice which ended the senseless slaughter on the western front. As we know now, it didn’t do Germany any good…..

Rolf Bueskens :

21 Sep 2010 9:48:52am

Just a minor but significant correction: The ‘unconditional surrender’ was imposed on Germany during World War II. Towards the end of World War I, Germany proposed an armistice which ended the senseless slaughter on the western front. As we know now, it didn’t do Germany any good…..

Emir :

15 Sep 2010 9:14:40pm

War is about winners and losers ? What a load of crap.

My family comes from BOTH sides of the war in the Balkans, so who is the winner and who is the loser ?

My fathers side is Bosnian and they remember Srebrenica and the other massacres where the UN (Dutch) peace keepers stood and watched it happen, coming to the "rescue" of the Bosnians a decade too late. Fat lot of good that did.

They remember the arms embargo which meant that the Bosnains couldn't defend themselves against the heavily armed Serbians and Croatians even when the iron lady was advocating very loudly that the Bosnians be armed so that they could defend themselves while the racontuers of the free world prevaricated.

My mothers side is Serbian and they remember the Chinese embassy being bombed by NATO and worrying themselves sick whether or not my grandmother was dead due to the idiot Americans bombing the block of flats in downtown Belgrade where she lived...

Cynthia Marchant :

18 Sep 2010 8:36:20am

I cannot but believe that those below who find Luttwak's views "interesting" etc are influenced by this odious fellow's credentials. Firstly, his views & examples don't make sense and if they are ever in accordance with the facts of history, it arguably isn't very often. Secondly, to argue the virtues of war is pretty well in keeping with Nazism isn't it? Thridly, I think it's fairly clear from his opening remarks that his jumping-off point is the Israel-Palestine conflict with its result of a refugee crisis which has not resolved to this day. He evidently believes that the stronger party - the Zionists obviously - should have prevailed because they were stronger, and the Palestinian refugees should have been abandoned by the international community. THis seems to assume that the creation of Israel itself owed nothing to international law & mechanisms - a ludicrous idea, given, just for starters, the emphasis given by Israel's supporters to the November 1947 UN vote in favour of the partition of the then Palestinian mandate, and Israel's admission in 1949 to membership of the UN itself! but of course he ventures far from this subject.

Listeners who are pleased to have heard Luttwak, listen again and assume Luttwak is just an ordinary person! What is so different from what he is saying and Hitler's Speehc to the Generals?

Geoff Saunders :

18 Sep 2010 8:06:04pm

My, what an interesting thesis. That wars should be fought to a conclusion between the belligerent parties, with no outside intervention to thwart a 'natural' outcome. Yes, I can see how it makes perfect sense.

Now here's an interesting hypothetical application of Mr Luttwak's idea. The year is 1973. The Yom Kippur war. The Arab armies, having caught the Israelis napping, have the upper hand and seem likely to defeat the Jewish state. At this crucial moment the Americans intervene with a massive airlift of arms and ammunition, tipping the balance in favour of Israel. The Arab-Israeli conflict is thus left unresolved, and festers until this very day.

Oh. What's that you say, Mr Luttwak? Your thesis doesn't apply in this particular case? Oh, I see. This is different.